http://www.charlotteobserver.com/wei...ry/458547.html
Husband wants his kidney back in divorce
By Chau Lam
Newsday
Posted: Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. When his wife needed a kidney transplant, Richard Batista gave her one of his, attorney Dominic Barbara said.
Now that Dawnell Batista has filed for a divorce, Richard Batista wants his kidney back as part of his settlement demand. Or, Barbara said Wednesday, his client wants the value of that kidney: an estimated $1.5 million.
Barbara said his client, a 49-year-old doctor from Ronkonkoma, married Dawnell Batista on Aug. 31, 1990. The couple have three children, now ages 14, 11 and 8.
After she had two failed transplants, Barbara said, his client donated a kidney to his wife in an operation that took place at the University of Minnesota Medical Center on June 18, 2001.
Richard Batista said his marriage at the time was on the rocks because of the strain of his wife's medical issues.
“My first priority was to save her life,” Batista said at a news conference. “The second bonus was to turn the marriage around.”
Dawnell Batista, 44, of Massapequa, filed for divorce in July 2005, Barbara said.
Neither she nor her attorney could be reached for comment.
Medical ethicists agreed that the case is a nonstarter. Asked how likely it would be for the doctor to either get his kidney back or get money for it, Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, put it as “somewhere between impossible and completely impossible.”
First and foremost, said Robert Veatch, a medical ethicist at Georgetown University, “it's illegal for an organ to be exchanged for anything of value.” Donating an organ is a gift – “when you give something, you can't get it back,” he said.